‘Gender and Justice in Scotland: Historical and Legal Perspectives’ is a collaborative symposium between the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History and the School of Law. The historical struggle for gender equality has transformed women's access to justice in Scotland today. Over the last two centuries, Scottish feminists and their supporters campaigned for women’s right to vote, to own property, to seek marital separation, to obtain custody of their children and to have bodily autonomy. Understanding women’s access to justice in the Scottish past can help legal practitioners and the courts make better-informed decisions when encountering similar problems today. The ways in which we make sense of women’s social agency needs to acknowledge the intersectional nature of ongoing discrimination throughout history. Even today, the struggle for gender equality is far from complete, and a glaring disparity between the achieved equality of women and their lived realities still remains.

This is a call for papers which aims to explore issues affecting women’s access to justice in Scotland across time and space, and we welcome research on all Scottish courts, regions, jurisdictions, ethnicities, sexual and gendered identities, languages and religious and confessional identities. We also welcome papers that approach Scotland through a comparative or international perspective. Post-graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply. We welcome abstracts from a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to): history, law, criminology and social science.

We invite papers that address the following or related themes in a historical or legal perspective:

• inheritance, succession and family law

• cohabitants’ rights on separation and death

• civil partnership, marriage, and divorce

• civil remedies for domestic abuse and gender-based violence

• reproductive health rights

• parental rights and responsibilities, children and adoption

The symposium will be held online on 6 and 7 May 2021. Please send a 300-word abstract with a short biography to the organiser with ‘Gender and Justice’ in the subject line by 19 March 2021.

Organiser: Dr Rebecca Mason, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Law Email: contact@womenmarriagelawscotland.org Co-organisers: Dr Maud Bracke and Dr Jackie Clarke (Centre for Gender History); Professor Jane Mair (School of Law)

First published: 2 February 2021

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